You owe the copyright lobby

Wednesday, August 8, 2007 at 3:09 | Posted in Bureaucracy, computer, copyright, Germany | 3 Comments
Tags: crazy

If you are reading this blog post, you probably possess a computer with a hard drive. There are, of course, also other ways to connect to the Internet but most of us still use a regular computer. Did you know that your computer is a device which is typically intended for recording copyrighted films and you should accordingly pay the copyright owners for the privilege of having a computer?

That seems to be the reasoning behind a ruling of the German patent officials. The story, as reported by Golem.de (via Farliblog) has it that computer manufacturers should retroactively as from 2002 pay a compensation of 15 € for each computer with a hard drive they sold.

I for one have had about half a dozen computers since 2002 but I have never used any of them as a substitute of a DVD recorder. There are typically other purposes I use my computers for. Or as Farlion puts it, you could just as well argue that the most logical purpose of a piece of paper would be writing down the contents of copyrighted books.